A meeting of minds on charters vs. public schools

At Friday's conference at Rhode Island College, educators discussed ways to balance order and academic rigor with compassion and creativity.

Linda Borg Journal Staff Writer @lborgprojocom

PROVIDENCE — Urban youth suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder at twice the rate of returning veterans. This condition has become so chronic that experts have coined a new phrase: complex PTSD.

Jeff Duncan-Andrade, a classroom teacher and leader in East Oakland, California, for 23 years, said unless public schools address the larger social fragmentation of urban children they will never get the results they champion: rising test scores and higher graduation rates.

"My position is there is no academic rigor without social justice," he told 200 teachers at an Educators' Institute sponsored by the Learning Community charter school in Central Falls. "As long as we compartmentalize them, we do neither."

Duncan-Andrade was the keynote speaker at the day-long conference at Rhode Island College, which aims to bridge the divide between public and charter school teachers. The Learning Community runs the Teaching Studio, a training program for public school teachers. The Friday forum also attracted teachers from Massachusetts and New York.

Andrade was provocative. He said urban parents too often have to choose between two equally unsuitable options: a totally chaotic public school and a charter school whose disciplinary policies are, in his words, punitive.

"These are a horrible set of options that no wealthy family would accept," he told a smaller group of teachers. "What parents really want is a third space where their children learn their value, where a mistake is not used an opportunity to punish but an opportunity to teach that the consequence is learning."

Andrade said schools that impose a rigid disciplinary code create students who are compliant.

"They are the happy slaves," he said. "They don't challenge" the accepted wisdom. "They are not precocious."

Andrade's school, Roses in Concrete Community School, teaches atonement. It begins with an apology, includes making it right and ends with making up the time stolen from another student or class.

"Time is the single most valuable thing we have," he said. "If you misuse it, it's gone. That's why you have to give back the time you stole."

"When they are cleaning the blackboard, I give them an extra sandwich," Andrade said. "It's called relationship building. It's that time that lets you get to their woundedness."

During an afternoon panel, several educators engaged in a wide-ranging conversation about the value of neutrality in classroom discussions about race, gender and politics. The consensus was that educators should be willing to broach these topics as long as they don't impose their own opinions on the class.

Dulari Tahbildar, executive director of a summer program called Breakthrough Providence, said exposing students to real-world issues is a way to develop empathy and critical thinking.

"We want to give students a vocabulary to have informed discussions," she said.

State Rep. Aaron Regunberg, who co-founded a youth group, the Providence Student Union, said developing youth voice should be a critical part of any civics class. When given the opportunity, students are eager to make changes in their communities.

"We'd be doing our students an injustice if we didn't discuss what's going on" today, said Donna Coderre, principal of Savoie Elementary School in Woonsocket.